Netflix Loses The League This Month, So Watch It Before It Goes Away

Just in time to brush up on your burns for this year's fantasy football league.

At the end of the month, The League is leaving Netflix, which means there's no better time than the present to finally watch—or re-watch—the best and longest-running comedy about fantasy football that we are aware of. (Are there others? Please let us know. Or don't. We really only need one, and it's The League.)

A loud, lewd, and riotous sitcom about a bunch of fantasy-football playing friends played by Mark Duplass, Nick Kroll, Jon Lajoie, Katie Aselton, Paul Scheer, and a guy who lied for years about escaping the World Trade Center during 9/11, The League ran for seven seasons on FX and always had a surprisingly stacked cast. A show about friends who are only really friends so they can make fun of each other, The League was about resolutely awful people in a fantasy league together that still managed to be funny for people who didn't give a damn about football.

What made The League a great show in the early going wasn't so much the fact that it was about football—in fact, the show was barely about football. In reality, The League was an exercise in absurd world-building, as the perverse friendship between its leads came with an endless stream of in-jokes, rituals of ridicule, and small bits of surprisingly involved mythology revolving around the gang's championship trophy, the Shiva, and the exploits of the show's inexplicably successful moron, Taco.

Few sitcoms are as ridiculously fun to blaze through than early seasons of The League. Each episode reveals each joke and insult to be a rabbit hole leading to more jokes or insults, and if you don't like those new jokes, don't worry, there'll be a call back to one you did like, and it'll be even funnier this time. There's also a parade of guest stars and recurring characters that bring a manic, unpredictable energy to the show, from Jeff Goldblum and Sarah Silverman to Jason Mantzoukas (who plays a coked-out madman better known as "Bro-lo El Cuñado").

Whether on purpose or by accident, The League ends up being incredibly binge-able television for about four seasons. The show starts to dip in quality in its latter half, becoming less absurd and more indulgent. Its characters get meaner in less interesting ways, and everyone in general just starts to grate the nerves. But if you want something great to stream in the lead up to the NFL season proper, or if you want to brush up on some good burns to drop on your real-life fantasy football league, start watching or rewatching The League, and keep watching 'til you're tired of it.